Watson, Thomas E.

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Watson, Thomas E. 1856–1922

Thomas E. Watson was a southern politician who rose to fame on the intersecting paths of class and race. In his early years he was a powerful spokesman for populism and the poor; later he combined economic radicalism with extreme Negro-, Jew-, and Catholic-baiting. His career carried him from Thomson, Georgia, where he was born on September 5, 1856, to the Georgia State Legislature, the U.S. House of Representatives, and the U.S. Senate.

In his youth Watson attended local schools, then a small Baptist college. He began studying law while teaching school, was admitted to the bar in 1875, and became a success as a trial lawyer. He was elected to the Georgia State Legislature in 1882, where he supported public education for children of both races and opposed the convict lease system. As the agrarian rebellion of the mid-1880s spread, he adopted as his own the platform of the Farmers’ Alliance, which included abolition of national banks and opposition to the crop-lien system. He was elected to Congress in 1890 as a Democrat from Georgia’s Tenth District, but upon entering Congress he shifted his allegiance to the new People’s (Populist) Party then emerging on a program of nationalization of transportation and communication, a graduated income tax, direct election of senators, the eight-hour workday, free coinage of silver, and other reforms. In Georgia, he led the fight for an interracial movement of the poor: At one point during the election campaign of 1892, when a black Populist campaigner was threatened with lynching, Watson called upon Populists to rally to the man’s defense. Two thousand white farmers marched to the Thomson village courthouse under arms, where they heard speeches by the black Populists and by Watson, who declared, “We are determined in this free country that the humblest white or black man that wants to talk our doctrine shall do it.” As one historian put it, “The spectacle of white farmers riding all night to save a Negro from lynchers was rather rare in Georgia.” “Watson has gone mad,” howled the conservative press (Woodward 1963, p. 240).

Watson’s call for unity of black and white poor was widely perceived as the most subversive aspect of his teachings. In an article in Arena, he wrote: “Now the People’s Party says to these two men, ‘You are kept apart that you may be separately fleeced of your earnings. You are made to hate each other because upon that hatred is rested the keystone of the arch of financial despotism which enslaves you both”’s (Woodward 1963, p. 220). One editor wrote, “The South and especially the tenth district is threatened with anarchy and communism” because of “the direful teachings of Thomas E. Watson” (Woodward 1963, p. 223). At the same time, there were fissures in the coalition, due in part to the differences in standing between black wage laborers and white farm owners. When the Colored Farmers’ Alliance proposed to call a strike of black cotton pickers, the president of the (white) alliance denounced it as an effort “to better their condition at the expense of their white brethren” (Woodward 1963, p. 219).

Watson ran for reelection in 1892 and again in 1894 but was defeated both times because of fraud and violence; in one election his opponent received a majority of 13,780 votes in a county with only 11,240 eligible voters. Nevertheless, the Populists made gains nationally, polling 1,471,000 votes in the congressional elections of 1894 and gaining several governorships. The party gained support in urban areas, where radical sentiments increased in the wake of the depression of 1893 and the 1894 Pullman strike, and hoped to replace the Democrats as one of the two national parties.

In 1896, the national Democratic Party, feeling the heat of Populism, nominated William Jennings Bryan for president on a platform of free coinage of silver. Whereas free silver had always been a Populist demand, it had been only one of many; now the party was confronted with a dilemma—to go with Bryan or hold out for the complete platform. At its St. Louis convention the party split, some voting to support Bryan (“fusion”), others to remain independent (“mid-road”). Watson resisted fusion, but as a compromise he agreed to accept the Populist nomination for vice president on a ticket headed by Bryan.

The election, won by Republican William McKinley, was a debacle for Populism, leaving its supporters embittered and leading to the party’s demise. Watson withdrew from politics, turning his attention to writing histories, biographies, and a novel. In 1904 he returned to politics with a new idea: The so-called Negro Question had always been his nemesis. If, he reasoned, the black vote could be eliminated as a factor in elections, poor whites would no longer be afraid to vote their interests and the banker-industrialists dominating the New South could be overturned. Hence, he endorsed the disfranchisement of black voters by any means necessary. In 1905 Watson asked in a widely distributed statement, “What does Civilization owe to the Negro? Nothing!! NOTHING!!! (Woodward 1963, p. 380). By 1913 when blacks were lynched at a rate of one per week, he wrote that “Lynch law is a good thing; it showed that a sense of justice yet lives among the people” (Woodward 1963, p. 432). The violence of his language propelled him to the front ranks of southern white-supremacist demagogues. He also launched attacks against the Catholic Church, which he accused of serving a foreign power, and against Jews, whom he saw as representatives of northern capitalist interests. His stirring up popular resentment of Jews led to the 1915 lynching of Leo Frank in Atlanta.

For fifteen years after his return he dominated Georgia politics, continuing to present himself as a champion of poor whites. He opposed U.S. entry into World War I, declaring it a war fought to safeguard Morgan’s loans to Britain: “Where Morgan’s money went, your boy’s blood must go” (Woodward 1963, p. 455). In 1920 he got himself elected to the U.S. Senate, where he supported the Bolshevik Revolution and opposed U.S. intervention in Russia. He denounced the League of Nations as an imperialist alliance and fought against increased military appropriations. To the supporters of a standing army, he asked, “Whom, then, do you fear? You are afraid of your own proletariat… . Such men as Mellon, and Hoover, and Elbert Gary, and J. P. Morgan … these vast combinations of capital want a standing army in order to beat down the dissatisfied” (Woodward 1963, p. 480).

Watson died on September 26, 1922. “Between seven and ten thousand people were said to have attended the funeral services at [his home in Georgia]… . Most conspicuous among the floral tributes was a cross of roses eight feet high, sent by the Ku Klux Klan” (Woodward 1963, p. 486).

SEE ALSO Southern Politics, 1883–1915.